Keeping An Active Handicap Account

As a member of the EWGA, one of your membership benefits includes a complimentary USGA handicap account with the My Golf Life system powered by GolfNet.

Go to www.ewga.com and click the Member Clubhouse box to login. Once you login, find/click the blue Handicap Box on the left hand side. Follow the instructions to activate of update your account and keep your UGA handicap current. It only takes a few minutes to start entering scores to establish a handicap. (Click here to see a screen shot.)

There are so many reason to establish a handicap. The EWGA is for golfers of all skill levels, and we use the handicap and index system for golf events and the Chapter Championship.

You may be asking yourself why you don't play quite as well as your handicap indicates you should. It's really very simple, the USGA Handicap System is based on your potential ability, not on your average scores. The USGA tells us that the average player is expected to play to her course handicap only about 25% of the time.

A little math may help to explain. Only the best 10 of the last 20 rounds are used to compute your index. That means that the worst 10 scores are tossed out, so your index reflects your best days. The arithmetic comes in when the differential is calculated for each score you post. The differential is the difference between your adjusted gross score (see Equitable Stroke Control, ESC) and the course rating. This is multiplied by 113, and then divided by the slope rating and rounded off to one decimal place.

Then, as if using ESC and the 10 lowest scores wasn't enough, your ten best differentials are averaged and multiplied by a 96% "bonus for excellence" factor. If your 12 best differentials averaged out to 12.3, your handicap index would calculate to be 11.8 using the 96% factor. Also, there is no rounding up, so if the calculation comes out to 11.89, the handicap index will officially be 11.8.

So what does this mean statistically? The USGA Handicap Research Team has determined that your best score in 20 is normally only two strokes better than your Course Handicap. The probability of doing that twice in 20 rounds is only one in 50.

As you can see, when the USGA says that your handicap index reflects your potential, they really do mean potential.